If I had dreams…

I know what you’re going to say: everyone has dreams. Well, I never seem to dream or, at least, if I do I never remember them. I’m not sure I really want to know what that says about me.

Anyway, if I dreamt, this evening might have been there, right in front of my sleeping eyes but I was very much awake.

The OH finally got himself onto Facebook just a couple of months ago and in the process hooked up with a former classmate of mine with whom he went out briefly when we were all in the same year at secondary school.

Since then he’s played piano in a couple of gigs with her dance band and taken part in an improvisation workshop. Now, Sarah got married earlier this year in a fairytale ceremony on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and tonight we were invited to the reception of the newly weds.

I hadn’t had much time to prepare for it: I’ve been both ill and busy this week, and found myself in a last-minute undergrooming panic: it occurred to me suddenly that there would be people there from school that I had;t seen for at least 32 years and that really more effort would probably be required than what I had managed to muster. If only I’d booked myself in for a brow and boob lift a couple of weeks ago…

Tweeps were most supportive during this angst interlude, and so encouraging – thank you Twitter at your best – and one perceptively commented that this would be a chance to face down the bullies after all this time. I hadn’t even thought about that but it was obviously lurking there in my subconscious.

Invited for 8.15 this evening, we were fashionably late and arrived to find that everyone was just on their coffee and fruit kebab course. Apparently we had been counted in for the meal, that had started at 6pm, but the time on our invitation was wrong.

As we walked into the beautifully-decorated sports hall, the jazz band struck up “How Insensitive,” and I was transported back over 30 years to when I longed to be the singer of the school dance band in which both the OH and my then friend played. It was her favourite song and one of mine then. Isn’t it funny how certain tunes tap something in your subconscious?

The bride had not changed at all and we exchanged pleasantaries and were all very civilised and polite and grown-up. There was no ice to break at all.

We immediately saw a previous Director of a band in which the offspring had both played, who was the husband of a colleague of the groom. Later we were chatting to someone we hardly know who has invited us for what sounds like a jam session in a Limousin farmhouse that sleeps 19 – we have other commitments that week – and, chatting to her husband discovered that he had been married to a previous accompanist of mine for singing exams. It was truly like one of those dreams where everything seems interrelated but you don’t know why. The world of musicians is small, I suppose.

There were a few people there from school days but no-one I really knew, though the people who were there recognised me.

MsDD, who had joined her place on one of the “kiddy” tables without fuss made a joke about gender normative clothing which fell flat with her audience.

In the midst of this the Boywonder called for a FaceTime but I had to decline, and then I spontaneously burst into tears when the dance band started playing “Something Stupid,” as the tune must have rekindled subconscious feelings of when he and I used to sing that together in the car when he was about eight years old.

Perhaps it was general tiredness or perhaps low blood sugar. Maybe it was the pressure to make a good impression or the conjuring of ghosts from the past but it was a surreal evening all in all. The only thing absent was nakedness and a series of missed trains.

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